Amazon Changes Stance on Encryption for Fire Tablets

After killing support for full disk encryption on its Kindle Fire devices and quietly removing it from Fire HD and Fire HDX 8.9 tablets with the release of Fire OS 5 in February, Amazon has had a change of heart.

Contacted by SecurityWeek last week, Amazon originally said the move to weaken data security on its Fire devices was because customers weren't using certain features.

“In the fall when we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we found customers weren’t using," an Amazon spokesperson told SecurityWeek on March 4.

However, after significant backlash and bad press, Amazon has changed its stance on full disk encryption, and says that it will bring back the data protection measure in the near future.

“We will return the option for full disk encryption with a Fire OS update coming this spring,” an Amazon spokesperson told SecurityWeek via email on Saturday.

Amazon’s flip-flop on encryption for its Fire devices comes amid avid discussions regarding the security and privacy of smartphones and similar devices after Apple refused to help the FBI unlock the iPhone belonging to the San Bernardino Islamic terrorist.

For more than 10 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.